Night Film

100

Back in Manhattan, I stopped at the emergency care clinic on Thirteenth Street. The waiting room was crowded and it took nearly three hours for a doctor to see me. I explained I’d just come back from a camping trip.

“I can see that,” he stated cheerfully, pulling the curtain closed. He was a chipper, quick-talking young man with overcaffeinated energy and Scotch tape accidentally stuck to the back of his white coat. “You have contact dermatitis. You did a fair amount of hiking through heavy foliage? Looks like you came into contact with something you’re allergic to.”

I was about to clarify that I’d been in the Adirondacks — when I realized, stupidly, that that was hardly the case. What about the swimming pool? An animal might have been decomposing in that water for months. And the Reinhart family greenhouse?

“What type of plants in the greenhouse?” the doctor asked after I sketchily explained some of this.

“One was called Mad Seeds. I can’t remember the others.”

“Mad Seeds,” the doctor repeated, tilting his head. And that didn’t make you want to run screaming out of there? he seemed to be thinking.

“I’ve also gotten stuck with something, a bad splinter.”

I showed him. Within minutes, a nurse was cleaning my hand with water and a topical antiseptic and the doctor, wielding a scalpel and a long pair of tweezers, was slicing into the palm, whitened pus oozing out as he took hold of something embedded inside and pulled it out. When I saw what it was, I was too stricken to speak, though the doctor chucked it on the stainless-steel table beside us.

“Looks like you had quite a camping trip,” he said, smiling. “Maybe next time try the beach.”

It was a black thorn off some type of plant, though my first thought was that it was a sharp twisted fingernail, crooked and two inches long.